Bodyguard

Well, still no word from the lawyer which has me a wee bit concerned. Anyway. The document looks really good and altho I have no idea what that means for our family in actuality, I feel good about the recommendation from the Embassy. Our aim is to have me leave immediately after Easter. I am calling tomorrow for flights, and it is probable that the wonderful woman who has been leading us thru this whole thing will be going with me.

Someone inquired today whether or not I have a body guard, and while I went laughing my head off in response, the deafening silence clued me into the serious nature of the suggestion. Hmmm... a body guard? I hadn't thought of that.

Well, no I'm not gonna have a body guard. Truth be told I am going to risk it all for this venture. There are times I lie awake in bed wondering if I am walking into my sure demise... searching to my death for a child, forever searching and willing to risk everything for the longing left after Trace died and took with him my womb. Maybe I am crazy, I think. What ever am I doing? Putting everything I already have in harms way in order to get the one thing I cannot have on my own. And maybe it is written that I shall not have anymore children, after all a mother could surely come to that conclusion after a miscarriage, a still birth and the catastrophic rupture of her womb. God is trying to tell me something, I can convince myself... and I am not listening. Maybe I barely escaped death last time and this time "they" will finally get me. Really? Is that the view of God/Goddess/Universe that I have? Some all powerful entity waiting to finally "get" me?

I don't know, that could be true, but I prefer to rest easy in feeling like Trace is at the helm with Spirit... that his coming and going brought everything they needed to into this life, that it was a perfect whole experience for him and me, and that while painful, it set the stage for us to open our home, hearts and beings to this baby with its own very real story.

For this is just the beginning, right? Or the continuation. I often wonder what it will be like for this baby... what its own story is... I dream of his brave mother who will have birthed him, and will have left him- either by the force of death, or by the force of something greater than I can understand- a mother who out of love, or grief, or knowing or fear, will have turned her back to this young being and walk away, a mother who will have given our family the very gift of new life. How was he conceived? How was he nurtured? How was his birth? How many hours, days did he lie still before he was found? How is the pain of this in his heart? Does his mother now drop to her knees in grief scream feeling her now flaccid and empty womb beneath her hand? Did she make a mistake? What will she carry for the rest of her life? And this baby... how did his ancestors survive 14 years ago when one million beautiful babies, children, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers were hacked to bits and left for the dogs in less than eighty days? This baby is only here because his people survived. And if this baby survived because it was his own parents who did the hacking, than they too are survivors of great grief and guilt and evil.

Maybe we will know the story and maybe we won't. Perhaps we will imagine it, or piece it into being like a quilt sewn square by square, sometimes disjunctive and sparse. Or maybe our child will always wonder where he came from and who let him go and he himself will carry the burden of his story, of his people.

And maybe, just maybe, that is why we go now to Rwanda... after our own losses (which I am not comparing to what happened in the genocide)and traversing the great expansive and barren territory of hell-grief, our own lives becoming post apocalyptic in a way, we can understand a little of the grief carried in the hearts and beings of these people who now have built hope on top of their own pile of bones. They are a people that have bloomed life from a truly apocalyptic state. In just a few days/weeks I will be blessed to set foot on those bones and feel the hope and reconciliation that exists today. There are people who killed building houses for the families of the dead. There are victims visiting the jails and verbally forgiving the killers of their families. This is the place we will be united with our child. This is illustration of hope and healing and the great heart of humanity.

No, no bodyguard. I go in vulnerable and humble, open to feel it all, ready to step into the church where piles of bodies still remain and try to imagine the 100 days of genocide, the stench, the cries, the machetes swinging. Ready to love a hundred babies with everything that I have knowing that soon I will have to walk away while they clutch to my legs, knowing that many of them will never have a family, that many will die of disease. Ready to hear the sounds, smell the smells, see the hearts of a different place on this earth. Ready to see the scars, hear the longing, listen for the joy. Ready to look into the faces and stories of a people that look different than but the same as my own white face. I am ready. I am open. I am un guarded.

Let me meet this child.